Frozen

Frozen is a fairy tale princess movie created by Disney and released on 2013-11-19. It is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. It uses CGI animation and features two princesses for the price of one. The movie became the highest grossing animated film in history at the time, not because it's that great, but rather, because Disney employs a fantastic marketing department.

Contents

Personal

I first saw this film on a flight to London in 2015. It was far from the best Disney movie ever, but enjoyable.

Review

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

The animation and graphic style is very nice. The color palette is superb, the particle effects are state-of-the-art, and everything just looks great.

Anna and Elsa are both interesting characters.

There are a lot of funny moments, especially from Olaf. "Look at that, I've been impaled."

I enjoyed the adult humor about "I don't want it / Come on, it's just a head," "shoe size not being important," and "unnatural relationships with animals."

I like the fact that the expected act of true love comes from a different, and less cheesy, source.

Bad

The music is meh. Let It Go is pretty good, and the others are cute, but they didn't really have the same punch as earlier Disney soundtracks.

No attempt is made to explain why Elsa has magical powers or why Kristoff was on his own as a child.

We're meant to think that relationship between Elsa and Anna is supposed to run deep, but they barely know each other both in the on-camera events or in the implied events.

After healing Anna in the intro, the trolls become entirely useless for the rest of the movie. In early development, they were supposed to also explain Elsa's powers, but Disney scrapped the story arc, which leaves you unfulfilled.

Ugly

The movie's objective is quite muddled. I'm usually fine with stories that have ill-defined problems, but I didn't really know what to make of this. It starts with sister's trying to overcome their problems, then adds in a villain with the Duke, but the Duke is impotent, so we go back to the sisters, then, after they fail to reconcile, we get an ice golem, then focus on Hans and Kristoff winning Anna's love, then, without warning, a different villain appears in the third act.